At healthcare organizations on Epic, Refuel projects can call for more capacity than your resident Epic experts have, making these projects opportunities for staff augmentation. As with any technology project, beginning with the end in mind can help position uniquely qualified experts where they are needed to complete the tasks towards a clearly defined Refuel project goal.
About Refuel Projects
Refuel is an optimization effort for longer-standing Epic customers that decide to get their system realigned with Epic's Foundation system, to reduce customizations that could be impeding newer functionality, and to make maintenance and upgrades easier/more efficient because they are on a more "standard" build.
Case study at a nonprofit hospital system
We worked with a nonprofit hospital system with 13 acute care hospitals, 300+ primary, urgent, pediatric, and specialty care locations that made for a sizable Refuel project effort for their internal Epic team to manage. We worked with the health system to provide Epic ClinDoc, Epic Cupid, Epic Hyperspace Reporting, and Epic Ambulatory analysts along with an Epic Cupid/Radiant Clinical informaticist and an Epic Ambulatory Clinical Informaticist enabling them to:
Manage physician impact for engagement and satisfaction.
- Minimize impact on physicians and their learning curve via modification of notification, scheduling, coding and charging functions in Epic.
- Engage with Physician service line leaders to gather their input and assess their needs/wants along with meeting the goal to realign the system with new functionality.
- Deliver improved workflows for providers and clinical staff across the spectrum of their health system based on direct input from the CMIO.
Support the company’s growth agenda with technology and expertise.
- Align staff around strategic imperatives for expectation setting and KPI measurement.
- Add two new hospital acquisitions to the system and onto Epic during this Refuel effort.
- Improve automation through rebuilding the system to Epic foundation and installing newer Epic functionality.
- Help with the conversion to Epic’s Hyperdrive during this Refuel effort.
- Help to standardize workflows across their health system for improving patient outcomes, reducing expenses, and improving revenue streams.
- Build, standardize, and update reports and dashboards within Epic to provide improved delivery of clinical and quality reporting data to key stakeholders.
Increase capacity of the team in the short term and position the team for success.
- Standardize documentation for accuracy, efficiency, and employee engagement.
- Promote population health, Joint Commissions standards, regulatory reporting, and other national standards with improved workflows and new informatics build needs. Add specific knowledge to the team when build/fix decisions with long term impact are being made. Our informaticists advised on best practice and improved workflows for the Ambulatory and Cupid spaces, improving outcomes and increasing patient safety.
- Manage a backlog of issues to introduce new team capacity, meet SLAs, and improve morale.
- Clean up the reporting library and manage new reporting workbench requests.
- Support this host organization’s Community Connect sites during the Refuel efforts.
- Mentor the health system's full-time staff that were not as experienced with Epic to help improve their learning curve and ability to deliver solutions.
Staff Augmentation is for Every Epic Organization
Refuel projects include build and fix activity that could take months. Embrace staff augmentation to temporarily expand the capacity of your team and realize return on your overall EHR investment with optimizations.
